Someone texted me (one of you) that the Spurs waived Primo. I was in the middle of a work call and couldn’t really process it. Obviously it had to be something egregious given how valued he was as a hooper. It seems it is. The San Antonio Express-News, ESPN, and others have been slowly revealing more about the situation. Given the detail, it makes sense for the Spurs to have cut ties with the kid.
Without knowing the details and the timeline, it does not appear the Spurs had any good alternatives. Primo released a statement basically blaming his past on the situation, and while that may be partly true — I mean everyone does something for some reason — there is no good way to proceed with a guy who doing this (allegedly) to team employees. It is 2022. This is a one-strike/you are out type of offense.
In other news, the Spurs are 5-2, one of the best starts in team history. Pop says “They are too young… they listen to the basketball gods and do the little things”. We wrote about that previously — the NBA season is long, and it is hard to care about the small things when you’ve seen hundreds of games. For these guys? They don’t know to not care about game seven … of the regular season.
The Bulls are incomplete, and a little banged up. The Timberwolves are a team in flux, figuring out how to incorporate Rudy Gobert, and learning how to follow up a playoff season. The dropped two of three to these Spurs, for a lot of the same reason: They didn’t do the little stuff.
This squad has a lot of similarities with the pre-Durant/Kyrie Nets, a team of hard-workers and hungry talents that like to play for and with each other. Playing like this won’t earn them the rights to Wembanyama, but then again that wasn’t a likely scenario anyway.